Clustrix nets $16.5M to push its database outside the box

NewSQL database player Clustrix just netted $16.5 million in new Series C funding, bringing total investment in the 7-year-old company up to $46.5 million. Clustrix will use the cash to build out distribution on both public and private cloud environments, expanding beyond the on-premises beachhead it’s established with its Clustrix appliance.

The round includes contributions from Clustrix’ current backers Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, and ATA Ventures.

“We have successful production environments running around the world with our appliance — so now the goal is to open up distribution to developers,” CEO Robin Purohit said in an interview. Towards that end, Clustrix recently made the new version 5.0 of its proprietary database available on Amazon Web Services. It’s already available on Rackspace, GoGrid, Equinix and BlueBoxGroup infrastructure.

Clustrix [claims] that it’s built a transaction database with MySQL-like functionality and reliability that can scale to billions of entries. Clustrix plans to sell its appliance (which consists of more than a terabyte of memory and its proprietary software) to web firms that don’t want to take on the complicated task of sharding their data (replicating it across multiple databases), or moving to less robust database options like Cassandra or a key value store such as what’s provided by Twitter.

Jesse Proudman CEO of BlueBox, one of Clustrix’s hosting partners, characterized Clustrix as a “‘fire and forget’ solution that takes care of driving scale within MySQL. Its core premise is unlimited scalability without having to build that logic into your application … [it] takes care of MySQL sharding internally.”

Clustrix competes most directly with dbShards if a customer really cares about MySQL compatibility and with NuoDB if they don’t, according to Curt Monash, president of Monash Research.

So when it comes to big-scale, Clustrix has a story to tell, but the market is flooded with rivals. Still, it doesn’t help that the overall cloud database category will be under the microscope given that Xeround, a MySQL startup, is shutting down this week, as GigaOM first reported on May 1.